creative construct

Last week in Ottawa, The Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity symposium brought together international participants to exchange ideas and practices on the development of cultural and creative spaces; cultural planning and investment strategies for cultural infrastructure and cultural districts; and collaborative approaches to enhancing the cultural vitality, creative potential, and competitiveness of cities and communities.

The Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity international symposium was organized by the Centre of Expertise on Culture and Communities at Simon Fraser University in collaboration with the City of Ottawa and from April 28th to May 2nd encompassed a series of plenary talks, panels, cultural research salons, and tours. Results of the symposium will be posted on the project website: http://www.symposium2008.ca/e/index.html.

How creativity generates unique spaces and the challenges of maintaining artistic priorities in creative economies were recurring themes. In this panel moderated by Caroline Andrew, Kate Shaw (Melbourne University), Will Straw (McGill University), Alan Stanbridge (University of Toronto) and Scott Thomson (Association of Improvising Musicians, Toronto) addressed issues and possibilities related to informal and alternative spaces and uses.

virtual artists/virtual architecture

RMB City is an installation of "virtual city planning" created by Chinese artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy, in Second Life, a landscape that is a parody of contemporary Chinese culture - a giant panda swinging on a crane counterweighted by OMA's CCTV building, for instance, and a commentary on the intensive urban hyper-capitalist development taking place across China:

"RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future."



In true "post-post-" fashion, you can see the documentary of the opening for China Tracy Pavilion in Second Life from June 2007, created as part of her participation in the rl Venice Biennale.




An exhibition featuring the latest iteration of the RMB City project continues at Lombard-Freid Projects in NYC until April 5, 2008.

panel presentation

Representational Engagement with Urban Space: Responses to the National Gallery’s exhibition Art and Society

Saturday, March 8 @ 5:00 pm Kamloops Art Gallery

Representational Engagement with Urban Space has been conceived as a forum to consider the KAG’s feature exhibition Art and Society in Canada 1913-1950, organised and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada, in relation to contemporary art, urban development, and quality of life in Canadian cities. The ideals and legacies of socially engaged arts groups, the Group of Seven, the Social Realists, and Les Automatistes, are discussed by three diverse Canadian scholars and researchers with the Small Cities CURA: Shauna McCabe (Newfoundland/New Brunswick), Andrew Hunter (Ontario), and Bruce Baugh (British Columbia). Sponsored by the Small Cities Community-University Research Alliance, Thompson Rivers University, in collaboration with the Kamloops Art Gallery. Free admission.

visualising process: Ed Burtynsky on documenting Shim-Sutcliffe's Integral House

imagineacity - installation views:
introduction + Ed Burtynsky - Integral House site photograph
wall (l-r) Shim-Sutcliffe Architects - Integral House (Toronto) process drawings; Ed Burtynsky - Integral House site photography; MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple - Canadian High Commission, Dhaka, Bangladesh (process drawings)


imagineacity - installation views:
Shim-Sutcliffe Architects - Integral House (Toronto) process drawings;
Ed Burtynsky - Integral House site photography

The Integral House sits at the edge of a Toronto ravine, a residential project that re-imagines boundaries of public and private, cultural and natural, monumental and intimate. Commissioned by Dr. James Stewart, calculus scholar and musician, the structure was to be not only a personal dwelling, but also a social venue for music and performance. Addressing unique contextual factors, situating the house in relationship to the strangely urban condition of Toronto ravines, architects Brigitte Shim and Harold Sutcliffe infused architectural design with sculptural form to convey a sense of connection to the unique qualities of site. Moving beyond a model of architecture as a neutral grid or box, the geometry of the design is dominated by the curve as it descends into the ravine, manifest in details such as an undulating perimeter wall and reflecting pool at the base, reiterating the structure’s natural context.

A unique record of the demolition and construction process was produced by photographer Ed Burtynsky, who documented the evolution of the house. One of Canada's most respected photographers, Burtynsky is best known for his depictions of global industrial landscapes that examine nature transformed through industry, transposing the raw elements of mining, quarrying, manufacturing, shipping, oil production and recycling into highly expressive visions, seeking out sites that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning.

Burtynsky was commissioned by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects to document the construction of the 18,000 square foot home on the Rosedale Valley ravine and to produce the architectural photography of the site development. Burtynsky offered insight into his visual approach to the architectural construction as an industrial site, in this CBC interview on site with Shelagh Rogers in 2005, going into year 2 of documentation of the project.

imagineacity

MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, Canadian Chancery and Official Residence, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2002-2005, parti sketch



Andrew King + Angela Silver, romalux/tantramar, 2003-2004/2007, two digital video projections

Artists + Architects: Vito Acconci / BGHJ Architects / Ed Burtynsky /
Chris Down /Andrew King + Angela Silver / Thorsten Knaub / MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple / Alison Norlen / PHB Group / Shim-Sutcliffe Architects

imagineacity

29 February to 30 March 2008
Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University
Sackville, New Brunswick

The soft city – a city made from a complex network of human relationships
and individual experiences…mapped out by its inhabitants… This is the city
as we imagine it. ~ Jonathan Raban, Soft City

imagineacity…a scribbled etch-a-sketch glowing with stretches of flowing freeways and clusters of neon symbols, commercial strips threading dense patches of pastel suburbs with downtowns and worn footpaths carving vague contours of remnant spaces, highrise corridors of echoing engines and whispering trails of passing conversation that continually rewrite concrete ley-lines marked by long-standing monuments and fleeting memorials.

Every city is a “collage city,” the phrase used by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in setting out their theory of urban aesthetics in the August 1975 issue of Architectural Review. Envisioning the city as a constellation of discontinuous fragments and multiple levels of urban reality constructed from disparate architectural elements, artifacts, and allusions, the idea picked up on earlier conceptions of urban space as infused by memory, perception, and experience, bringing them into the repertoire of architectural aesthetics.

imagineacity offers an accumulating archive of urban “charts,” artistic explorations of space that have reconceived these intangible elements of urban space, reworking concepts such as Walter Benjamin’s itineraries and convolutes, Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, and Michel de Certeau’s spatial stories, to reveal the ways the connections between people and place are fluid, continually made and re-made. Artwork is interwoven with material from architectural design process – sketches, drawings, blueprints – reinforcing the imaginative and speculative texture
of within even the most durable architectural surfaces and built realities, compositions that map ideas onto space to offer a sense of the city as open and always emergent.

Thorsten Knaub, GPS Miró, 2007, urban intervention, data animation, GPS unit, custom programming

In the “collage city” constructed here, all architectures are permeable, at once material, cultural, and metaphorical. Each element re-imagines the bigger project of the city, and the way architecture shapes and historicises social experience. Weaving spectres of the built environment that emerge through the intersection of architecture and imagination, imagineacity draws attention beyond formal spaces to suggest the consistency of the city as at once real and intangible, material and fantastic, concrete and paper, planned and poetic.

Public reception & projection of student architecture proposals @ 7:30 pm, Friday March 28th, 2008

Curated by Shauna McCabe and presented by the Owens Art Gallery in conjunction with the Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space (CHARTS), Mount Allison University, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Marjorie Young Bell Endowment Fund.

in process

Chris Down, laying out projection for urban warfare



Students talk with architect-artists Andrew King and Angela Silver about their new work.

This week, we are in installation mode for imagineacity, an exhibition that looks at the interface of artistic and architectural design processes at the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University. On site are Andrew King and Angela Silver, Alison Norlen, and Chris Down. King and Silver have created a new work based on local urban elements to complement romalux, the digital video piece created in the context of their Prix de Rome prize residency in Rome in 2004. Alison Norlen is creating a new site-specific installation of drawings and wire maquettes that play with the idea of familiar and forgotten "useless architectures" in urban follies, and will workshop ideas with participants in the Architectures for Creativity seminar. Chris Down has been creating a wall-scale painted site-specific installation, urban warfare, based on an image of a table top model of a futuristic city for the game "WarHammer 40,000." Woven with these and other art works are a series of installations of architectural representation in the form of sketches, blueprints, and plans, suggesting the shared imagination of space that underlies both realms and the thoroughly social, cultural and ephemeral character of contemporary built and visual landscapes.

contemporary + built + environment: a public seminar

Andrew King + Angela Silver, Romalux, 2005, installation, Stride Gallery, Calgary

Michael Awad, Grand Canale, Venice, 2005, digital chromogenic print, edition of 8, 12 x 96 inches

Tuesday February 19 @ 7:30, Mount Allison University hosts a public seminar on contemporary engagements with the built environment, featuring presentations by artists/architects Michael Awad (Toronto) and Andrew King + Angela Silver (Calgary).

Moving architecture into broader investigations of public space, Awad, King and Silver have developed distinctive approaches to built environments and urban design/planning through projects that probe the dynamic intersections of art, architecture, and culture. Addressing their architectural and creative practices, the presentations and discussion will take place at the Owens Art Gallery on Tuesday, February 19 at 7:30 p.m. and everyone is welcome to attend.

This seminar is presented by the Centre for Canadian Studies as part of a mini-symposium addressing issues related to art, architecture, urban design and Aboriginal culture from February 18-21, 2008

The presenters:

MICHAEL AWAD is currently the chair of the board at the InterAccess New Media Art Centre in Toronto. A trained architect, Awad is well-known for his on-going artistic endeavours and academic research in the field of study "Aboriginal Urbanism." He examines the complex relationship between Aboriginal culture and modern urban design. An adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Awad's research was recently endorsed by the Architectural Dean's Council to incorporate it into the curriculum of Canada's ten architectural schools. Awad's art practice in photography has also made him a known name in the art world. His photos are part of the Art Gallery of Ontario's permanent collection and he has been commissioned to produce work for the Pearson International Airport and the Department of External Affairs. Awad was also recently featured in the publication Canadian Art.

ANDREW KING and ANGELA SILVER's collaborative work has explored contemporary urbanism and the relationship of the body to the built landscape through multimedia architectural installations. An architect, author, critic, curator, and educator, King has been a recipient of both the Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome (2003-04) and an Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect, with work published in several national and international publications. He has held adjunct positions in Canada and in Europe and is currently a visiting lecturer in architecture at Carleton University. Silver is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her performative work has been presented recently in New York and at Toronto's Nuit Blanche in 2007.

While at Mount Allison, all three will also meet with students in several disciplines. Michael Awad will meet with students in Fine Arts, Geography, English, and Canadian Studies, while King and Silver will work with students in Fine Arts and Geography, and will involve interdisciplinary students in the Architectures for Creativity project in the development of new work they are creating in Sackville.

Michael Awad's visit to campus is sponsored by the Centre for Canadian Studies and the Department of Geography and Environment. Andrew King and Angela Silver's participation is sponsored by the Centre for Canadian Studies as well as the Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space.

creative construction

A symposium exploring creative engagements with urban space and challenges of cultural infrastructure, The Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity, will take place in Ottawa from April 28 to May 01, 2008. The work of Architectures for Creativity will be presented there as a component of the dialogue surrounding creative engagements with urban cores.

The international symposium organized by the Centre of Expertise on Culture and Communities at Simon Fraser University and the City of Ottawa will examine the role and potential of cultural infrastructure to support and further culture and creativity in cities and communities. Delegates include cultural planners and policy-makers, civic leaders and elected officials, and educators and urban theorists interested in sharing ideas and learning about the latest innovations and developments globally. Workshops and panel discussions will address such themes as convergences of culture with industry and science, urban renewal, and alternative financing and partnership solutions in the cultural sector.

For further information visit www.cultureandcommunities.ca

space interrupted

a project of Improv everywhere

house as monument and memory

On the invitation of Mount Allison's new VP Student Affairs, Ron Byrne, Colville House on Mount Allison's campus was the location of Architectures for Creativity symposium on February 5th. With its history as the residence of artist Alex Colville, this offered a particularly good opportunity to look at architecture as a layered record of cultural representation, official narrative, personal experience and public memory.

The production of space through cultural representation is inevitably more complex than simple. Artistic and literary images have often served as sources of spatial meaning and symbolic value, as have historical narrative of events, sites, or figures which lend themselves to commemoration in the form of public monuments. And yet architecture is lived as well, spaces invested with personal memory, experience, and interpretation.

First published in French in 1957, and translated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is a philosophical meditation on the pursuit of such symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture. “We are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms,” Bachelard wrote in a chapter entitled “House and Universe.” “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Undertaking a “topography of our intimate being”—of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its cellar and attic, rooms and garrets —Bachelard began a systematic study, what he called a “topoanalysis” of these spaces so poetic and familiar they become integrative, reconstituting the dispersed elements of our lives, and of being.

Considering Gaston Bachelard's emphasis on the experiential and phenomenological, participants "excavated" traces of the Colville House as dwelling-place, and the memory embodied in built form. Since 1978, Colville House had been transformed into a student residence and was renovated more recently in 2001 and yet original details like the corners, nooks, arched windows and doorways, shutters, fireplace and curved staircase still exist. The rubbings and sketches produced evoke memory in an inventory of details and suggest the depth of spatial imaginary of the built environment more broadly.

subtle sackville

In advance of a workshop with artist Eleanor King on the creation of audio walks, on the evening of Tuesday January 29 students walked through Sackville, using ideas developed in the tradition of "psychogeography." We all make our way through the spaces around us everyday, but theorists from Walter Benjamin in the early 1900s to Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1960s, and Michel de Certeau in the 1980s emphasized that walking through urban spaces could also be a tactic allowing us to see and understand our surroundings in new ways. The Situationists described this practice as psychogeography, a big word that essentially simply was a way to get past habit and official descriptions to consider the meanings and more informal uses associated with surroundings. They would sometimes layer a map of one geography on another, creating new encounters with familiar spaces.

Focusing on areas of downtown Sackville, each group was asked to observe elements of public space as they made their way - the distinctive impressions of various areas and of the thresholds between them, what spaces may allow or disallow, and to consider how they know what they know along the way.

sight + sound impressions





















front stage/back alleys






monuments and messages




public description and public memory: campus


signs and symbols

project: architectures for creativity

From January to April 2008, CHARTS is presenting Architectures for Creativity, a protracted symposium involving interdisciplinary students and participants. Each week explores an area of critical theory related to space. Architecture is the subject matter, and we are looking at the ability of both formal and more ephemeral architectures to embody critical spatial practice. As well as introducing a history of creative forms as research and intervention in contemporary surroundings, a series of visiting participants will model different contemporary approaches in this investigation.

Applying the evolving ideas in two main creative projects, students will consider these concepts in relation to their visual surroundings:

* an audio walk that explores elements of narrative, memory, and imagination in the experience of built landscape
* an architectural proposal for a cultural space to be built for a vacant lot at the corner of Bridge and Main Streets in Sackville's downtown; will be presented as digital projections on site Friday March 28, 7 pm


Schedule and Participants

January

• 8 introduction
• 15 influences and intentions
• 22 modernity and monumentality
• 29 retelling the city: practiced places and spatial stories

February

• 2 workshop, audio architectures with Halifax-based artist Eleanor King Saturday 12-4 pm
• 5 phenomenology and everyday architectures
  
• 12 collage city: meaning and context in the urban landscape : : Peter Rukavina on Plazes and contemporary senses of place
• 19 spaces of imagination and representation : : 6 pm Andrew King / 7:30 pm public seminar on contemporary approaches to the built landscape - Owens Art Gallery with Michael Awad (Toronto) / Andrew King + Angela Silver (Calgary)
• 30 imagineacity exhibition open @ Owens Art Gallery : : Vito Acconci / BGHJ / Ed Burtynsky / Chris Down / DIN Projects / MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple / PHB Group / Andrew King + Angela Silver / Thorsten Knaub / Alison Norlen / Shim-Sutcliffe Architects

March

• 4 counter-spaces and alternative architectures : : workshop Alison Norlen (Saskatoon)
  
• 11 nature and place: organic architectures and critical regionalisms : : presentation Silva Stojak, BGHJ architects (Charlottetown)
  
• 18 virtual + architecture : : presentation Dr. Josephine Mills, Director, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery on Histories, Realities, Prospects: The Erickson Building
• 25 from universe to meta-verse
• 28 imagineacity exhibition reception Owens Art Gallery + public projections of student architectural proposals @ corner of Main and Bridge Streets, Sackville, New Brunswick

April

• 1 Hyper_spaces
• 8 Conclusion
  

what we do...

Welcome to CHARTS, the Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space based at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick

Our research focuses on the imaginative and symbolic quality of space, on landscape as layered and dynamic, examining the forces that shape built landscapes and what architecture might contribute to our understanding of real and imagined places. Here, "architecture" is used in broad sense, encompassing formal and informal practices, not simply buildings, but the creative forms and critical ideas that underlie and infuse the imagination and experience of spaces, beyond their functionality. For spaces are in no way static, but liquid - constantly shifting and changing, like Graham Swift's Waterland, by "simultaneous accretion and erosion: neither progress nor decay."

When you look past surfaces to see this fluidity, things get interesting - it is where the ordinary takes on the light of the out-of-the-ordinary, allowing glimpses of the concealed inner workings of landscape, "public secrets," and of the relationship between space and meaning - the way architectures are thoroughly ephemeral, or as Lisa Robertson describes, “neither palatial nor theatrical but soft.”

A key focus of CHARTS is on creative activity as critical research, central not only in shaping perception of place, but actively intervening in the imagination and experience of everyday life. We are starting from an assumption of the inextricability of the real and imagined, for as cultural theories have suggested, the construction of identity and memory is a spatial process, taking place not only in physical forms, but in language, stories, images, and thought. The goal is to create a platform for production and experimentation as well as the dissemination of cross-disciplinary research practices that build new forms of knowledge.

Taking advantage of its home within a progressive institution that has prioritised creativity as a strategic element linking disciplines, CHARTS pushes boundaries and definitions of research and supports collaboration, innovation and the dissemination of ideas locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The program also draws on its surrounding context, a community with thriving levels of arts and civic activity, to show the relevance of critical theory to contemporary visual and built landscapes, exploring ways in which forms of critical and creative research interface with the public domain and diverse public experience.